Wade Gong's sister was 28 when she first felt a deep pain near the side of her stomach. Then she noticed the lump. The Chinese immigrant was uninsured, so she didn't go to the hospital right away. When she finally did, it was too late. She was in the late stages of liver cancer caused by hepatitis B, a silent virus that had been assaulting her liver since she was born. An Amherst graduate and math whiz who lived with her brother and parents in Rosemead, she died six months after being diagnosed.

The Food and Drug Administration issued a health warning Wednesday about potential problems associated with two drugs widely used to treat fungal infections of the nails and skin. The FDA is requiring that labels for the prescription drugs Sporanox and Lamisil carry stronger warnings about potential liver damage, and labels for Sporanox also cite potential heart damage.

The woman extended her wrist, so the man in the turban--supposedly the finest "pulse diagnostician" in the world--could examine the health of her entire body. After perhaps 30 seconds of touching the pulse in each of her wrists, the 70-year-old Indian physician provided his judgment through an interpreter: Tightness in the lower back and neck, pressure in the lower abdomen, heaviness in the stomach after meals, heat in the liver and upper part of the small intestine . . .

The Food and Drug Administration is investigating reports of liver damage in patients taking alli, the only nonprescription weight-loss drug approved by the agency. Regulators say they have received more than 30 reports of liver damage in patients taking alli and Xenical, the prescription version of the drug. The reports, between 1999 and October 2008, included 27 hospitalized patients and six who suffered liver failure. Alli and Xenical are marketed by British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline, although Xenical is manufactured by the Swiss firm Roche.

Hats off to Scott Harris for a well-informed article about Dr. Ronald Busuttil, a man to be praised and admired for his work in a medical field dear to my heart--and liver ("God's Right Hand," July 11). As a grateful recipient of a donor liver at UCLA Medical Center last April, I'm feeling good and have a new lease on life. (I also have a soul mate, an infant, with whom I share my donor liver. While Dr. Busuttil operated on the baby, Dr. Mark Ghobrial "installed" my liver.) The economics of organ supply and demand are cruel, giving life to some and denying it to others.

Re "Transplant deaths at USC a puzzle," Dec. 29 Why haven't we read that liver transplantation is one of the great achievements of modern medicine and the only curative option for patients with end-stage liver disease? That these are the sickest patients ever to undergo surgery, and that most donor organs are nowhere near perfect? That more patients' lives are saved by liver transplantation in Southern California than in any other region in the country? Although all healthcare institutions should be held to the highest standards, we must recognize that liver transplantation is the last and only resort to save dying patients with liver disease.

In findings that may represent a breakthrough in the treatment of hepatitis C infection, researchers have reported that weekly injections of an experimental medication that denies the virus a foothold in the liver substantially drove down subjects' viral loads after five weeks of treatment. Fourteen weeks after the injections ended, researchers found that five of 18 infected subjects getting the medication's higher doses showed no detectable trace of infection. The new study describes a treatment approach that could outsmart the hepatitis C virus's penchant for developing resistance to existing drugs and "provide curative therapy to a large proportion" of the 170 million people in the world who are infected with the virus, wrote Harvard University physician Dr. Judy Lieberman and Dr. Peter Sarnow of Stanford University.

The headline in the newspaper article ("Bruce Wayne Alcohol Level Above Limit, Report Shows," Oct. 24) gave the impression to the casual reader that Bruce Wayne was guilty of drinking and then flying his airplane. Orange County Crime Laboratory criminalist Marty Breen's analysis and conclusions of Wayne's blood alcohol content left out a very important factor: Wayne suffered from a "deteriorating liver." This fact was determined at autopsy and mentioned in the same article. Now, since the liver is the organ for alcohol breakdown, can standard tables, based upon a normal healthy adult with a functioning liver, be fairly and accurately used for comparison in Bruce Wayne's case?